


i beg to see you dance just one more time

by constant_vellichor



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Benzaiten Steel Was A Dancer And I'm Really Cut Up About It You Guys, Character Study, Gen, Sarah Steel's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22012978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constant_vellichor/pseuds/constant_vellichor
Summary: Sarah Steel, harried and distracted and dragging both her feet and her children, drops Benzaiten Steel at his first dance lesson when he is three and a half years old and forgets to pick him up for two hours afterwards.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel
Comments: 10
Kudos: 59





	i beg to see you dance just one more time

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 'Dance Monkey' by Tones and I.
> 
> EDIT: This fic now has art by the wonderful seratlantisite! Find it at https://seratlantisite.tumblr.com/post/190300529869/constant-vellichor-wrote-a-benzaiten-thing-that

Sarah Steel, harried and distracted and dragging both her feet and her children, drops Benzaiten Steel at his first dance lesson when he is three and a half years old and forgets to pick him up for two hours afterwards. Juno is there too, of course, but since he bruises his knee partway through and spends most of his time sitting against the wall sniffling Ben counts the dance lesson only as _his_. He furrows his brow and copies the teacher’s moves as well as his little limbs can and, for once, doesn’t fidget or yell or get into any mischief at all. He’s just as well-behaved when the worried receptionist tasked with minding the twins when their mother doesn’t arrive at the end of the forty-minute lesson sits them both down, wedged in the corner of the mirrored walls of the ballet studio, as she makes call after unanswered call to Sarah Steel’s comms. When Juno tries, time and again, to get up and explore the old studio building to hunt for ghosts or check for secret passages, Ben tugs him back down by his right hand with a breathless ‘ _watch_ , Juno’.

Because the dancers in front of him are _magic_.

They _must_ be, Benzaiten reasons, because even though they’re much more grown-up then he and Juno are he’s never seen any adults do things like _this_ before. There is a boy who jumps so high that Ben has to crane his neck to watch from where he sits cross-legged, and a girl who swings another dancer over her head like he weighs nothing. Another girl throws her leg out and spins so many times that even Ben, who can count to fifteen which is five higher than Juno can, makes himself dizzy trying to count. When Sarah Steel arrives, heels clicking angrily on the polished hardwood floors of the foyer, yelling at the receptionist to _fucking call her next time, she was working, how was she supposed to know the lesson was so fucking short_ , Ben lingers in the doorway to the ballet studio even as Juno throws his arm around their mother’s legs and squeezes tight, watching the magicians dance.

Sarah was entirely ready to badmouth the Halcyon Dance Studio for the rest of her life and spend a few more creds on her rotating cast of babysitters, but after a stream of excited babbling from Ben and pestering from Juno after Ben promises to give him sole custody of the next toy their mother brings home, she keeps up paying for lessons, and is usually only late by twenty minutes or so remembering to collect them. Benzaiten cherishes those once-a-week lessons, and while Juno steals snacks out of the other kids’ bags and on one memorable occasion floods the bathrooms after trying to see how hard he can kick the water cooler Ben mouths the names of the moves the instructor shows them and tries to copy the twirls and tiptoes of the older students without falling over _too_ many times. The nice receptionist learns to tell the twins apart almost every time and calls him ‘Benten’ affectionately when she ruffles his hair.

When Ben runs out of Sarah Steel’s office and to the safest place he can think of, it is the nice receptionist who finds him crying on the doorstep of the studio and brings him home, hand in hand. They move to Oldtown a few weeks later, and he never sees her, or Halcyon Dance Studio, again.

~~~

After Sarah gets… bad, the Steel twins very quickly realise that if they want things other than bare essentials (and sometimes those, too, depending on the month) they’re going to have to get them themselves. For Juno, this means shoplifting Andromeda dolls from Oldtown’s one tiny, well-defended toy store (he gives Ben a Draco figurine for their eighth birthday, with the roaring voice box removed so it wouldn’t bother Sarah) and getting paid pocket change after starting a lunchtime fight club with Mick Mercury. For Benzaiten, it means developing the galaxy’s best smile, and it is while flashing this charming, lopsided grin to a very nice elderly couple as he slips his hand into their pockets methodically in search of interesting things to pilfer that he hears the music.

Benten hasn’t heard music like this in a long time- the only songs he knows by heart are the ones he hears in commercials running on their fuzzy monitor at home- and it surprises him enough that he jerks abruptly away from the old man bending down to pinch his cheek, the creds clutched in his fist spilling out of his fingers and clattering loudly on the slick street. Before the very nice elderly couple can realise that the earnest little boy asking if they’d seen his mother was robbing them blind, Ben is running in the direction of the music.

He’s not in Oldtown anymore- he’d snuck on a bus this morning and gone a district over to Stitch, slightly less decrepit and with slightly more to steal. The downside to his master plan to collect all the riches Hyperion City had to offer was that he didn’t actually know where he was going. This fact hit him three unfamiliar blocks away from the scene of his near-perfect crime, and dissolved instantly the second he saw the dancers.

Benzaiten remembered vaguely that his long-ago dance lessons had been in ballet- some kind of old-Earth style, graceful and smooth and set to strange, ancient music. Whatever these dancers are doing, it’s not that- there’s an old comms hooked up to a speaker on the sidewalk blasting a neopop song so loudly Ben can feel it pounding in the tips of his fingers, and somebody’s battered cap lying haphazardly in front of it with a small pool of creds inside. It’s a far cry from bright lights and waxed floors, but he’s no less entranced by the six- no, seven- teenagers who slide and spin and _one of them bends all the way backwards and flips back up again he thought they could only do that in movies-_ and suddenly, as usual when anything fun starts happening, the cops arrive.

Out of habit borne of bearing witness to many a fight (especially those started by his twin) Benten slips into the closest nook he can find- a narrow, sticky alleyway, which exist everywhere in Hyperion City no matter how nice the district is- and peeks out silently as a gangly HCPD officer waves a blaster after the laughing group of dancers, who have packed up and run quickly enough that this can’t be their first run-in with the cops. Ben waits, back against the damp wall, until the angry yells fade, then dashes in the direction of the faint, still-playing music.

These dancers have a studio too.

Ben almost didn’t expect it, not with how at home they all seemed to be on their stage of scuffed shoes and chewing-gum pavement. But there it is- an old warehouse, with grubby carbon-fibre walls and a section of the roof covered by cheap blue tarps. He watches as the teenagers scurry in, whooping and laughing and elbowing each other, music changed now to something quieter but no less energetic, and makes a very big decision very quickly. He memorises the street names on either side of the corner the studio is on, takes a deep breath, and turns to find the closest bus station.

Three weeks later, Benzaiten Steel stands at the open door of Stitch Dance Studios with resolve burning in his small face and weight bulging in his small pockets. When he marches inside, his footsteps echo with a vigour that can only be conjured by a very determined nine-year-old with a very big dream. He scans the room for an appropriate judge to which he can plead his case, and finds one in the single biggest person he had ever seen sitting at a table, staring straight at him. Ben reaches into his pockets, and the resulting clatter of cash against the plastic of the desk is almost deafening- all four hundred and nineteen creds that Ben and Juno were able to scrounge from odd jobs and odd thefts and one nerve-wracking heist of Sarah Steel’s wallet after payday.

Benzaiten flashes the person at the desk the galaxy’s best smile, and asks for however many lessons four hundred and nineteen creds will buy him.

~~~

There is a run-down building in the heart of Oldtown.

Actually, there are many, many run-down buildings in the centre, middle _and_ outskirts of Oldtown, but none of _those_ buildings matter to Benten because none of _those_ buildings are going to be the Steel School of Dance like this one is.

He has a _vision_. He’s going to buy the place off the city, renovate it within an inch of its life, hang all the awards its students are going to win along the wall of the lobby right next to the enormous trophy cases they’re going to need, stud the walls of every studio with speakers blasting every kind of music you can think of, hang polished mirrors from floor to ceiling and install barres made from real Earth wood. Then after he’s made a fortune and revolutionised the Solar system’s conceptions of what it means to be a dancer, he’s going to buy Mom a house and a therapist back in Halcyon Park and Juno a commissioner’s position in the HCPD and nobody will never have to deal with any bullshit ever again.

Benten knows all of this for sure, because he’s already halfway there. He’s close to what he needs for a lease on the place, and if he cuts back on groceries just a _little_ more he should be able to start cleaning it up properly in a year or two. Staying with Mom had not been… fantastic, but it had kept him from paying exorbitant rent and, more importantly, kept him close to Stitch and to teaching to pay off his own classes. Teaching, working, odd jobs, the occasional minor felony… they added up. He was tired, but they were adding up.

God, he was tired.

As soon as he found the energy to stand up, to climb down from the roof of the dilapidated building that would become the Steel School of Dance, to go home and try not to snap at Sarah for one more night, he would get back to work. But right now? Benzaiten Steel watches the reddish Martian sunset, dimmed behind the pearlescent sheen of the dome that protects Hyperion City, and allows himself to dream for a little longer.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm constant_vellichor on Tumblr and I've fallen very deeply in love with the Junoverse, so HMU there if you wanna hang out! Leave a comment and I'll love you forever.


End file.
